A Dead Man's Hand
by HorcruxesandHallows
Summary: The Joker just wanted the Batman back, for everything to return to how it was. The last thing Harper wanted was to get mixed up in his games, but the Joker had other ideas. Set after the Dark Knight. M for violence, gore and adult themes.


**Chapter One**

Harper Stephens could feel a blister forming on the heel of her aching left foot. She winced as she hobbled along on it to clean the last table she could that night. It had to be close to ten o'clock by now, but still two tables were occupied.

At the first, as always, sat Stan, a forty-something divorcee, who walked with a limp and a crutch, and had waited until closing time almost every evening for the past three years Harper had worked at Billy's Diner to ask her to take her home. She had always politely declined. In the second was another man, but she hadn't paid much attention to him before now, and she didn't recognise him with his face hidden beneath his baseball cap. He had come in less than an hour ago and sat drinking the same coffee ever since. She figured that if she started getting ready for closing, he would take the hint and leave. No such luck yet.

"Hey, gorgeous," Stan called to Harper as she was picking her coat up from around the back. "When does your shift end? Maybe I can give you a ride home."

Harper laughed lightly and shook her head. She knew exactly what he wanted to give her, and it was not a ride in his car. "I'll be fine, thank you," she said, stifling a yawn.

"You sure? It's getting pretty dark out there. You won't feel safer with anyone else than me." He waggled his eyebrows as she said it. At least he was a trier, she thought. Even with the twenty year age gap. He tapped his bad leg with his hand. "I may not look like much, but I'm secretly a black belt."

"A black belt?" she asked incredulously. "Stan, I don't even know how they still let you drive with that leg. Besides, I'd feel safer with the Batman." She sat opposite him and slapped the keys to the diner down on the table before leaning down to rub her hurting foot.

He made a disgruntled noise as he drained the last of his coffee. "You'd feel safer with a murderer?"

"The Batman's not a murderer." She felt her face burn at the thought.

"He killed Harvey Dent," Stan insisted as he put on his cap.

"He must have had a reason." Harper was only half listening, glancing at the stranger at the front of the diner who seemed to have no intention of leaving.

"Harvey Dent was the best thing to happen to Gotham City. Most likely Batman didn't like him trying to pretend to be the Batman. Harvey stuck his neck out for a common criminal. A masked vigilante. And Batman turned around and stabbed him in the back!"

"Those are big words, Stan." She rubbed her bleary eyes and resolved to resort to the old-fashioned method of telling the man to get the hell out of here. It was what Billy, the owner of the diner, would always do, but tonight he had had to leave an hour early due to a 'family emergency'. "Did you hear them on the news?"

Stan ignored the question. "I'm telling you: Batman's nothing but a cold-blooded murderer!"

"No, no, no... You've got it all _wrong_." The two of them turned to the front of the room, where the man sat concealed in the shadows.

Stan squinted in his direction. "Oh, yeah? And what would you know?"

"Actually, I think I know quite a bit." The man's voice was so familiar to Harper, soft and slow and quiet. She considered it as he stood up, and a gasp caught in her throat. "Why would the Dark Knight, the caped crusader, the hero that Gotham deserves but not the one in _needs_, and all that _jazz_, suddenly turn on Harvey Dent, the _White Knight_?"

He took a step forward, the lower half of his body cast into the light, and her blood ran cold at the sight of his deep purple trousers. The further towards them he came, the more she felt like her heart would leap from her throat, so fast was it beating. She knew the voice. She knew the suit. She knew the white skin, and the green hair, and the nauseating, blood-red Glasgow smile. She knew the Joker.

"Once upon a time," the Joker began, licking his mouth delicately, "I was the most feared man in Gotham. I know. Hard to believe, right? This guy in the cheap suit and the clown make-up couldn't possibly have run an _entire_ city. But I did. And I was _good_ at it. _Very_ good."

Harper stared at him. Her legs ached for her to run, but the weight of her beating heart kept her frozen in her seat. The Joker was close enough to touch, and the sight of him made her feel sick. She knew what he was capable of. Everyone in Gotham knew what the Joker was capable of. But she didn't understand what he was doing here. Or where he had been for six years. Or why he was talking to them at all.

He licked at his lips again, carefully, almost as if they still pained him, and nodded towards the seat beside Harper. "Is this seat taken?" He didn't wait for her to reply, sitting down and pulling himself up to the table. She could do nothing but stare at him, at his surreal presence that didn't seem to make any sense to her, and think of the fact that she was only wearing one shoe, and that running might be difficult without the other one.

"But then," he continued, "I went and killed the Batman's girlfriend." He shook his head and held up a finger. "Big mistake... Did I mentions she was also Harvey Dent's squeeze?" Stan shook his head slowly. "So, she's Harvey Dent's squeeze, and he goes crazy because he can't stand the idea of being without her, and he wants to kill the Batman, and blah blah blah... Doesn't matter. What matters is that the Batman was... _broken_. I hold my hands up. Not exactly the best career move for me." He grinned, revealing a full set of yellow teeth. "And now the Batman's gone into hiding. It's pretty sad, don't you think?"

He looked sideways at Harper, as if noticing her there for the first time, and cocked his head to one side. "You don't think it's sad?" he asked softly. It was as if every word was designed to mock the recipient. "I lost... my _soul-mate_. My reason for _being_."

Harper kept her eyes fixed on the Joker's. She listened intently to every word he was saying, yet she didn't understand any of it, her mind distracted by movement out of the corner of her eye, but she could think of no way to tell Stan to stop whatever mad, brave idea he had without notifying the Joker.

"You don't talk much," said the Joker. "Is it the scars? Hm?"

She took this as her cue - the cold look he gave her as he came to the conclusion that she was disgusted by him; that she thought he was a freak. She didn't want to know how he got them. She didn't even want to look at them. They made her feel so sick. Her seat was knocked over beneath her before she could realise she was backing away, her feet scrambling to get a grip as her tights slipped against the wooden floor.

The Joker only watched her, like he was interested to see what she would do before he did anything about it. He didn't see the crutch coming, and she didn't expect it either. It hit him in the side of his head and knocked him from his seat, where he lay in a giggling, hysterical heap.

Stan dropped the crutch and held his hand out to Harper, but she couldn't take her eyes off the Joker, clutching at his stomach as he knelt on the floor, in such a fit of hysteria that she thought he might make himself sick.

"A little fight in you..." he wheezed through his laughter. "I... _like_ that."

"Harper, come-!" Whatever Stan was about to yell was cut short by the sound of shattering glass and gunfire, and he was cut short by the bullet that caused it. Harper backed against the wall, her hand covering her mouth as she muffled a scream at the sight of his crumpled body, of the blood that ran red on the floor.

The Joker hauled himself to his feet, completely unperturbed by the events. "Do you want to know how I got these scars?" he asked her. She whimpered against her hand, tears blurring her vision as she shook her head back and forth. "No?" he said slowly, shaking his head along with her as he upturned a chair and then a table in order to get closer to her. "I'll tell you anyway."

Harper pressed her back up against the wall, shaking as she sobbed. Her knees gave in and she found herself sliding down the wall, but the Joker caught her by the front of her shirt and forced her upright.

"Come on, don't cry. Save it for the end of my story," he said, wiping gently at her wet cheek with one hand and pressing a knife to her lips with his other. She tried to pull away, but there was nowhere left to go. "You see, I was a loner at school. I didn't really like the other kids, and I used to get beaten up by this one jerk who thought he was... all _that_ because his brother was the local drug dealer...

"So I decided to teach him a lesson. I go to his house, and he's there alone, and I beat him with a baseball bat. You should have heard him scream..." The Joker grinned at the memory, pressing the blade into Harper's mouth, who only wept continuously in his hold. "He screamed and he screamed and he screamed... He was... a _screamer_. And I had never been so _happy_. But his brother doesn't see the funny side of it. Nope, not a bit. He comes home, sees me laughing, and he pulls out this knife." He pulled the knife back from Harper's lips so she could look at it. "Bit like this one. And he sticks it in my mouth. A bit like this." She pressed her lips together, screaming through clenched teeth as the Joker pushed his fingers through her lips and forced her mouth to open. "And he tells me he's going to wipe the smile off my face.

"That's what you call irony, huh?" He paused, waiting. "Because I've never stopped smiling? It's a joke, _sweetheart_. Don't you see the funny side?"

"Hey, Boss?"

The Joker sighed at the sound of the voice behind him, swiping his tongue across his top lip in frustration. "Yeah?" he growled.

"It's not there, Boss," came the voice again.

The Joker rolled his eyes, pulling the blade from Harper's mouth to turn around. "So, _where_ is it?"

She couldn't take her eyes off the back of the Joker's head to look at the other man, whose face was hidden by a clown mask. She edged along the wall, towards the door to the back room, but then she realised that the door was locked and the keys were lost under a body.

"I don't know, Boss," the man in the clown mask said.

"You don't know?" The Joker held his hands up and turned to talk to no-one in particular. "He doesn't know, Ladies and Gentlemen! He doesn't _know_! Can I... see that for a second?"

He ponted to the man's gun, and he handed it over instantly. The Joker didn't even blink before he shot him dead.

Harper didn't hesitate. It was stand still and be shot or be shot while running. The Joker threw the gun down and caught her effortlessly by the waist, pulling her struggling form against his body and holding her tightly.

"Now, _where_ are you going, _sweetheart_? Hm? I don't want you running away now, not before we've had our fun."

He barely even grunted when she elbowed him in the stomach.

"Your problem is that you're too serious," he said in her ear as she cringed away from him. He turned her to face the body of Stan, and held her face still so that she would look. "Look at him. He looks so... _serious_, doesn't he?"

She screamed and pushed back at him, but he pushed her forward, towards the body and grabbed a hold of her hand.

"Maybe... Maybe we can put a smile on his face. Together."

"No," she whispered repeatedly, though it did no good against him. "No, please, no."

"That's it," he whispered as he forced her to kneel with him, and forced the knife into her hand. "That's it, that's it, that's it." He kept repeating it over and over, whispering words into her ear. She squeezed her eyes shut, as tight as she possibly could, but she could still feel the knife as it cut into human flesh.

_**This is my first Batman fanfiction, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Please review.**_


End file.
